You have a flat rate shipping charge for all items in the contiguous United States but you also want to offer free shipping on select items. The confusion arises when the customer combine free shipping and flat rate shipping items together in the cart – naturally, the whole cart can’t be free shipping! Through the

If you need an all-purpose way to block certain crawlers, bots, scrapers etc from your Magento site, here’s a simple way to get the job done. Backup your .htaccess file and add the folowing lines at the top of the file: Block unwanted Crawler Bots ##### RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(Baidu|spider|Yandex|robot|crawl|wget).*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Google|MSN|Yahoo|Bing).*$

Here’s a simple way to add a random image/text rotator in a CMS block – no php or template required – pure javascript! I was looking for a way to add random (or specific) information to our customers as they browse the site. I needed (1) specific system message for things like order delays, system issues

Magento doesn’t allow guests to print their order on the checkout success page for security reasons but there’s a solution that doesn’t require any installation of extensions – simply modify one template. OPTIONAL: Before we start, we’re going to be modifying the checkout success template which can be tricky because you’ve got to create a

If your site has a lot of categories and/or sub-categories, your layered navigation “Shopping Options” block can get pretty large. An option is to make each category collapse or expand thereby saving valuable real estate on your page. The method is pretty straight-forword. 1. Copy/Backup app/design/frontend/default/YOURTHEME/template/catalog/layer/view.phtml 2. In your new copy, make the following changes

If you’ve recently installed/upgraded to Magento 1.9, you may be receiving and error when a customer tries to register a new account. Changing one line of code should fix your situation – COPY: app/code/core/Mage/Customer/Model/Customer.php TO: app/code/local/Mage/Customer/Model/Customer.php In your LOCAL copy, make the following change around line 844 (comment out the $confirmation line and replace with

I’ve had instances where I’ve updated a specific image yet wanted to keep the same image name etc. If you upload the image via the admin panel, it will append a “_1” to the file name thereby creating a whole new image. The code below will delete the specific image (or images) from every cache

As a general rule, you can’t combine a javascript confirm prompt with your php code because one is server side and the other is client side. Here’s a work-around that will get you a basic confirm prompt if, for example, you’ve done a database inquiry and you want the user to confirm an update before

Here’s a straight-forward and fast way to backup all your images for active items into a zip file that can be downloaded or ftp’d to another site. Another advantage of this methodology is it will also report on any “broken” images you may have (image doesn’t exist even though it’s defined in the product file)

Here’s a simple method to create a separate CMS page that lists all brands and/or manufacturers (uses the manufacturer attribute). Instead of using the advanced search page (which uses the attribute code instead of name) that doesn’t have a dynamic page title, this method uses the regular search page which displays the manufacturer name in

Magento Tips & Techniques

Magento is one of the leading E-Commerce platforms. The information provided in this site hopefully will help you with some "tweaks" to enhance the shopping experience or assist the administrator.

The posts are in no particular order but are added whenever I think of a tip, technique, code snippet or change that I think might be useful to the community.

I've only included 'hacks' that can be implemented by someone with a general Magento structure knowledge and basic php skills. More sophisticated Magento modifications are available from numerous sites and the Magento Knowledge base.